Chapter Eighteen
STRIKING THE BALANCE: A U.S. VIEW
From 1993—when the United States first indicated that it would be
truly open to a vigorous “European pillar” within the alliance,
through the Berlin-Brussels agreements of 1996 and the “Berlinplus” agreement of 1999, to the building of major bureaucratic structures for a European Security and Defense Policy—much has happened, not just in this one corner of the development of transatlantic
relations for the 21st century, but in the total corpus of European security. NATO has admitted three new members and promises to take
in more—its “open door”—at the November 2002 Prague NATO
summit. The European Union is also moving deliberately toward expanding its membership. Both institutions are deeply engaged in
Central Europe, in Russia, and in the Balkans. And both are
“deepening”: the European Union more obviously, with its European
Monetary Union; with its Single European Currency, the Euro, in
early 2002 to replace 12 national currencies; and with its efforts to
leap ahead with a now-fledgling but to-be-fully-developed Common
Foreign and Security Policy and European Security and Defense
Policy—in some senses final acts of the devolution of sovereignty
and thus still a long time in developing, but clearly now on the way.
For its part, NATO has also been “deepening,” in that it has reaffirmed the United States’ role as a permanent European power; preserved and modernized its critical integrated military command
structures; engaged a wide variety of other states in its unique
Partnership for Peace (and companion Euro-Atlantic Partnership
Council); begun efforts to forge a potential “strategic partnership”
with Russia and a “special partnership” with Ukraine; revamped its
military strategy and commands (including its innovative Combined
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Joint Task Force headquarters); and, for the first time, engaged twice
in actual combat and in two post-conflict peacekeeping forces—all
with intense lessons for the future of European security and NATO’s
role in helping to create a “Europe whole and free.”
Within this overarching framework for building European security
for the future (in which other institutions—such as the UN, the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE], and
the Council of Europe—also play roles), special attention is now
being paid to the European Security and Defense Identity, or
Policy—successor to the Western European Union—and to its relationship with NATO. As ESDP has developed, at least 11 separate
purposes have emerged as central:
•
Move forward the process of European integration.
•
Lay the basis for, one day, having a truly functioning “European”
foreign policy—potentially with concomitant engagements and
responsibilities beyond the continent of Europe, including in response to requests from the United Nations.
•
Provide one framework for adjusting relative political influence
within the European Union (in this case centering primarily on
France and its relations with other states, especially Germany).1
•
Enable the Europeans to have an added insurance policy—however minor it may prove to be—that they could act with military
force in some limited circumstances if, for some reason, NATO
(meaning, in practice, the United States) chose not to be engaged; realistically, this would be most likely to apply in some areas beyond Europe, such as parts of Africa—assuming, of course,
that the European members of ESDP were inclined to take military action, either within the Petersberg Tasks or as an extension
of them.
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1 As an added benefit for France, the creation of a Headline Goal Task Force that
could—and would—take action in the event of military contingencies in francophone
Africa would help reduce the burdens on Paris’ acting alone. This could be part of
Paris’ attempt to exert added influence in Europe in the foreign policy and security
realm. In theory, of course, other European countries could seek to use the rapid reaction force, or just EU crisis-management capabilities, in outside-of-Europe situations
where they have unique or at least preeminent interests.
Striking the Balance: A U.S. View 139
•
Do something to address the constant refrain from the United
States about burden sharing within the alliance, among other
things to reinforce U.S. incentives to remain engaged with
Europe’s strategic and political future, while also giving the
Europeans some more weight in deciding, politically, where
NATO should be involved militarily, and how.
•
Provide some added political incentive for modernizing indigenous military forces, especially difficult in the absence of a palpable military threat—modernization that can also help
European militaries remain, to the degree possible, interoperable
with more-rapidly modernizing U.S. military forces.
•
Give the Europeans, through the European Union, some more
say in decisions reached within NATO—an incentive reinforced
after the Kosovo conflict, even though that conflict in fact also
reinforced the sense that NATO would be required—for the indefinite future—to undertake any military operation of that size
and complexity and with comparable political constraints.
•
Buttress the process of EU enlargement into Central Europe,
while also helping to give those European allies concerned a
sense of being able to compete for influence there with the
United States.
•
Spur the consolidation of European armaments industries, both
within and across borders, provide some added demand for their
goods and services, and create a political framework for both
competing and cooperating with their American counterparts.
•
Tackle the long-standing question of the relative distribution of
influence between the United States and its European partners
within the broader Atlantic Alliance: an inchoate aspiration, but
one that is behind much of the debate—on both sides of the
Atlantic—about the future of ESDP and its relationship to NATO.
•
Give European governments a greater say—and reduce pressure
on them—regarding a legal mandate for military action. This was
an important issue at the time of the Kosovo conflict: where
NATO acted without a formal mandate either from the United
Nations Security Council (UNSC) (under Chapter VII of the UN
Charter) or OSCE, a situation that caused considerable difficulty
for several governments. Thus, it is important that various EU
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documents on ESDP stress that it “recognizes the United Nations
Security Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of
international peace and security.”2
For the United States, there is much to welcome in most if not all of
these ESDP goals. The United States has long supported European
integration, not as an end in itself, but among other things as a
proven method of reducing the risks of future conflict in Europe and
now as a means of increasing a sense of security in Central Europe.
The U.S. desire for an increased European role in defense, both relatively and absolutely (and adjusted for post–cold war conditions),
has a long pedigree but also a long record of mutual frustration on
the two sides of the Atlantic. The United States clearly welcomes efforts that will reduce recurrent European fears, much diminished
since the end of the cold war, that somehow the United States will
“decouple” its security from Europe’s. It welcomes incentives to
increase—or at least stabilize—European defense spending, especially where this will help the European militaries to be interoperable
with NATO forces and, specifically, to be consistent with the alliance’s Defense Capabilities Initiative.
The United States should welcome the development of a Headline
Goal Task Force that focuses on development of military capabilities,
especially in peacemaking and peacekeeping, and whose military
capabilities in the main can also contribute to NATO operations—
given that most of the basic European forces would be virtually the
same, whether employed by NATO or by the European Union under
ESDP.
Furthermore, the United States should welcome development of a
CFSP and ESDP that can, in time, lead the European nations to play a
more active role beyond Europe—assuming, of course, that the
respective strategic visions of the United States and, in general, the
European allies will be compatible if not identical (since they are not,
at times—notably in places like the zone of Arab-Israeli conflict). In
areas where the United States would have significant interests, this
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2 Göteborg European Council, Presidency Conclusions, June 15, 2001, op. cit., para-
graph 47. Of course, even NATO relates to the UNSC’s “primary responsibility.” In
these ESDP documents, however, the reference can be read to have more-thanroutine political significance.
Striking the Balance: A U.S. View 141
European capacity to act beyond the continent would also assume
that the United States would be prepared to share assessment of
threats and challenges beyond Europe, what should be done about
them and by whom, and the process of decision and control
regarding foreign policies and, potentially, military action. By
contrast, where the United States did not have significant interests,
or were content to see the Europeans simply act on their own—and
this applies to much of Africa, both parts of the Maghreb and much
of sub-Saharan Africa—then European efforts should be seen by the
United States as clearly positive, so long as there were no distraction
from a simultaneous need for the use of European military assets in a
crisis affecting NATO.3 Also—as a quality often discussed but not so
often emphasized—the United States should welcome a European
capability for crisis management, especially civilian aspects, and
even the use of military force that falls below the threshold where
NATO would need (or want) to become engaged, but which
nonetheless can be effective—operation Alba, to help stabilize
Albania in April 1997, readily comes to mind.4 And there can be significant benefits from “European capacity for action in the civil
fields,” that would not have to be duplicated by NATO—or the
United States;5 indeed, the EU has some unique advantages in
dealing with situations in a holistic way—including political, civilian,
nongovernmental organization, and economic instruments—that
NATO cannot match.
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3 As the French defense minister said in February 2001,
the European capacity that we are establishing will widen the range of tools
available to the transatlantic community for crisis management. Our
American allies must be able to decide on their participation in the management of a crisis without being constrained by European impotence to
endorse alone the choice between action or abstention (Alain Richard,
February 3, 2001, op. cit.).
4 Of course, this operation was led by Italy, after the WEU turned it down—among
other reasons, because Germany did not want to engage in a second operation when it
was testing the limits of its political ability to use military force (in the Bosnia
Stabilization Force) and because the United Kingdom was at best ambivalent about
the WEU’s undertaking a military operation on its own.
5 See Alain Richard, February 3, 2001, op. cit. Also:
The development of a European crisis-management capacity, which has become necessary for Europe if it is to assume its responsibilities, is therefore
useful to the Alliance, and strengthens our transatlantic partnership (ibid.).
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These are all on the positive side of the ledger. But there are also
negatives for the United States to be found in the European Security
and Defense Policy (and aspects of CFSP, as well). Most of these negatives are about method, however, rather than about purpose and intent. These issues will need to be resolved in order to ensure that
NATO and EU/ESDP will be compatible with one another, that they
will work toward the same basic objectives, and that transatlantic security and political relations will be strengthened, not weakened, by
the development of ESDP. The key problems for the United States so
far identified center on the following:
•
ESDP may stimulate some greater European defense spending,
but that spending might go primarily to purchase capabilities
that NATO already has in abundance; or it could be wasteful in
terms of efficient use of scarce resources (e.g., the A400M large
transport aircraft and even the Eurofighter); or it could stimulate
(for political reasons) European efforts to close or restrict arms
markets to competition from outside, including the United
States. “Unnecessary duplication” is more than just a U.S. slogan; it risks becoming a serious reality. Likewise, candidates for
NATO membership could be pressed to accede to ESDP requirements (including “buying European”) at the expense of
preparing to be effective NATO allies.
•
By contrast, ESDP could, in time, lead some allies to believe that
they can meet the military requirements of the Headline Goal
Task Force—and thus domestic political requirements—without
facing the much more onerous and expensive demands of NATO
force modernization, especially the DCI, at a time of rapid U.S.
modernization, thereby risking the “hollowing out” of alliance
military capabilities. In other words, the “talk” of ESDP and its
institutions could substitute for the “walk” of increased defense
capabilities.
•
The elaboration of structures and processes in ESDP could,
whether intended or not, cause competition with NATO’s structures and processes, if only because “the beast has to be fed”:
structures once in being get used and, at a certain level of bureaucratic size and complexity (the EUMS is already significant
in both size and competence), can compete successfully for the
attention and priority required to keep NATO processes as effec-
Striking the Balance: A U.S. View 143
tive as possible. Indeed, an ESDP as political and bureaucratic
distraction from NATO may become the chief legitimate U.S.
worry.
•
Also, the still not-entirely-resolved differences regarding planning (not limited to Turkey’s circumstances) have special significance for NATO. First, having more than one place where operational planning takes place could potentially lead to differences
in outcomes that could, at the very least, complicate any situation in which the EU, acting on the basis of ESDP, had to hand
over responsibility to NATO, or where NATO had to decide what
forces it could usefully transfer to an ESDP operation without
prejudicing its own ability to act—a cardinal point from the June
1996 Brussels agreement. The problem would be greater if there
were not total transparency in the planning processes—which in
fact can only be assured if NATO’s planning staff is constantly in
the same room with ESDP’s—e.g., a national planning staff—and
if ESDP planners are at NATO.6 Among other things, any translation (escalation) of a crisis from one conducted by the European Union through ESDP to one conducted by NATO—whether
non-Article 5 or Article 5—could become that much more difficult and potentially dangerous. There have been indications that
this problem could be resolved by maintaining the locus of
planning in the main within NATO, assuming that Turkey’s objections to completing the process of NATO-ESDP relations were
lifted.7 This compromise could still leave “national” headquarters (in practice, either Britain or France) acting on only some
relatively low-level operations or on military operations in some
specific areas (such as parts of Africa) where there would be a low
probability of NATO engagement but a possibility that European
states would want to act. This might prove an effective compromise; but the point about NATO in a fully transparent en-
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6 As late as February 2001, the French defense minister said that:
Where an operation does not call on NATO assets, an operational staff
formed around a core provided by a national strategic staff will carry out the
operational planning. This staff would be multinational and reinforced by
officers from the other nations participating in the operation (Alain Richard,
February 3, 2001, op. cit.).
7 Comments to the author by various EU and NATO officials, Brussels, May–June 2001.
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gagement with ESDP operational planning, wherever conducted,
is still important, both in principle and in practice.
Second, if defense planning—i.e., developing force structures
over time—were bifurcated, with NATO’s adopting one system
and ESDP’s adopting another, inconsistencies, incompatibilities,
and inefficiencies—already the bane of military planners in the
alliance—could become worse. Bifurcation of course would
make more difficult the process of relating ESDP activities to
those of NATO, could complicate the problem of interoperability,
could put decisions directed toward developing the Headline
Goal Task Force at variance with NATO requirements, and could
introduce uncertainties regarding the potential transition from
an EU/ESDP to a NATO operation. To be sure, most of the current EU states take part in NATO’s procedures, including the
critical Defense Planning Questionnaire; but not all do. Important will be whether France agrees to adopt (or mimic) the DPQ,
and whether the two defense planning processes are both sufficiently compatible with, and transparent to, one another. Even
so, with both operational and defense planning, the development of any competing ESDP capabilities would make NATO’s
life more trying.
•
Additionally, the demands of internal political cohesion within
the EU could make it difficult to resolve the issue of full participation by non-EU NATO members—notably Turkey—as a matter of EU process integrity (if not theology), thus risking a split in
the invaluable, if not indispensable, sense of cohesion among allied states, without gaining anything truly significant in return
(i.e., a rapid reaction force that would in fact be undertaking
major responsibilities for European security). Of course, Turkey
risks exaggerating the problems that lie in the way of its effective
engagement with ESDP; it may be using these issues as part of its
more important political concerns about membership in the EU;
and its actions—at least as evident through mid-2001—could
cause it to lose the moment, in terms of NATO’s having as much
influence as possible on the shaping of ESDP practices and procedures. But Turkey’s concerns are not without merit, and if
these concerns are not reasonably satisfied (along with those, in
particular, of Norway and Canada), a shadow would be cast over
other NATO–EU/ESDP relations.
Striking the Balance: A U.S. View 145
•
The political impetus to make CFSP and ESDP effective could
lead not only to an “integrity” in the relationship between crisis
management and employment of force that NATO cannot currently match for reasons noted above (this is NATO’s problem),
but also to support for full implementation of the Maastricht and
Amsterdam provisions for coordination of national positions in
international institutions—in effect, a “European caucus” within
NATO that, if truly pursued to meet the provisions of the
Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union, could
impair the capabilities of the North Atlantic Council and could
tend to produce “least common denominator” outcomes. Here,
pragmatic solutions might be effective, and it is true that, in all
countries that belong to both NATO and the EU, there are
“internal consultations”; but even if the EU states pay mere lipservice to the Maastricht and Amsterdam provisions, lack of
clarity about the process can reduce confidence, especially in
Washington.
•
Also, the process of relating crisis management to the use of
force—where CFSP/ESDP operates quite differently from NATO
and whatever body or country assumes responsibility, on a caseby-case basis, for NATO-related political crisis management—
could complicate the issue of determining just how NATO would
gain what the United States sees, but not all European allies see,
as a necessary right of first refusal—i.e., when it would be determined that NATO as a whole is not prepared to be engaged.
This could become a significant problem, especially if one or
more European countries were bent upon trying, perhaps for
political reasons, to manage a crisis and an accompanying military action without recourse to NATO—however illogical that
proposition would be given the value of using the full range of
NATO capabilities, including the spreading of political risk to include the United States, whenever possible.8
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8 The possibility of tactical differences among even the closest allies cannot be ruled
out. Some instances include disagreements over peace plans for Bosnia in the early
1990s; differences over enforcement of the arms embargo against parties to that conflict; the complex way in which Operation Alba had to be put together to help Albania
when neither NATO or the WEU were willing to act directly; and frequent squabbling,
especially at the military level, over the conduct of the Kosovo campaign.
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On the negative side of the ledger for the United States are some additional concerns, related to purpose and intent, of which the following are most important:
•
European rhetoric about ESDP (and CFSP) could become so
exaggerated—as is natural during a process of institution
building—that some U.S. observers might (erroneously) believe
that the EU/ESDP could take over more of the common burdens,
and reduce those falling on U.S. shoulders, than would in fact be
the case.
•
Differences in the way in which the purposes of ESDP are characterized by different European states and political leaders could
continue to sow confusion in the United States, especially about
some instrumental relationships between NATO and EU/ESDP
(e.g., on operational and defense planning), as well as about the
types of operations the EU could actually undertake through
ESDP. Such confusion could risk that EU/ESDP would be seen, in
practice, as a potential competitor for NATO.
•
A reverse problem could arise if a “division of labor” grew up between the European Union (ESDP) and NATO (especially along
the lines of relatively high and low military technologies) however much both bodies recognize the problem inherent in a
“division of risks”—e.g., airpower versus ground combat—and
work to prevent it. This “division of labor” could produce an implicit fracture in the assumption that providing security in
Europe is a common good to be pursued by all allies, although in
practice in different ways depending on circumstances. Nor is
this issue limited to the development of ESDP. The issue of
whether the United States is prepared to share military tasks—
and hence risks—with European allies has been a theme running
through most debates about allied engagement in the Former
Yugoslavia from the early 1990s onward. In Bosnia and Kosovo,
these debates were eventually resolved, more or less successfully;
but as of the time of this writing, it is not clear that such success
will also hold true for Macedonia. Indeed, expressed U.S. doubts
in 2001 about putting troops at risk in a NATO force for
Macedonia raised some concern among other allies, with a significant impact on perceptions of the overall U.S. commitment
to engage in real-life NATO activities containing some degree of
Striking the Balance: A U.S. View 147
risk. European perceptions on this general point have played a
major role in the politics of ESDP’s development.
There must be an important qualifier, however. There could
emerge a “division of labor” in regard to crises or other challenges beyond Europe, in areas where the United States (perhaps
with Canada and a few other allies) would not see its interests to
be significantly engaged and where, therefore, the issue of
NATO’s becoming involved militarily might not arise and the allies might not require the United States to be engaged. This is especially true in parts of Africa. Indeed, had there been a
European capacity for action (an effective rapid reaction force) in
the 1990s, it is conceivable that Europeans might have decided to
intervene in Rwanda, assuming that the added military capacities, a crisis-management mechanism, and a sense of “sharing
the risk” would have produced more political will on the part of
key states.9 Left unaddressed, however, is another meaning of
“division of labor”: that the United States would want the allies to
become engaged beyond Europe—truly “outside of area”—but
would be unable to gain a consensus within the alliance to do so;
this is the great “emperor has no clothes” of NATO’s future.10
•
Finally, the issue of the relative balance of influence between the
United States and some or all European states could become
sufficiently bound up with the structure and conduct of ESDP
that crucial elements could be lost, such as the principles of
common commitment by all allies to European security, risk
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9 See House of Lords, Select Committee on European Union, Fifteenth Report, July 25,
2000, paragraph 42:
Surprisingly, a scenario like Rwanda was seen as particularly appropriate for
EU involvement by Mr Richard Hatfield, Policy Director of the Ministry of
Defence. He told us that “Were that situation to come up again, it could be
done under European Union auspices but it would not be done under NATO
auspices because NATO has no security role in relation to Central Africa.
Of course, the point is historically moot but interesting in terms of British Ministry of
Defence thinking about the future of ESDP.
10 Beyond the scope of this study are considerations of relying upon “permissive”
decisions by the North Atlantic Council (NAC), but where only a few allies take part in
military actions; the use of NATO infrastructure even where the NAC does not give its
formal blessing—as happened during Operation Alba; or the development of “coalitions of the willing and able” to act with the United States “outside of area.”
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sharing, and subordination of such issues as the balance of political influence to more-practical matters of getting the European
security job done.